Horsemeat scandal: in for a torrid time?
Monday 11 February 2013
 Meanwhile, from Le Monde on the one hand, and the Mirror on the other, there are suggestions that Romanian horsemeat is produced legitimately, and properly labelled. The president of the FSIA union in Romania, Dragos Frumosu, tells le Monde that it is hard to believe that a Romanian slaughterhouse could produce horsemeat and label it beef. French importers, he says, might be complicit with the Romanian producer, changing the labels after delivery. More or less corroborating this, The Mirror has a source speaking of a "large French supplier" which buys cheap horse meat from the Romanian abattoirs and mixes it with meat bought from legitimate suppliers, selling it on up the supply chain as organic. However, the Romanian link is not the only problem. There is a definite report from Ireland, from two days ago, implicating "frozen beef products" containing 38 percent unlabelled horse meat. Here also, there is a "suspicion of fraud", which is strengthening Owen Paterson's contention that we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy of considerable proportions. With six French supermarket chains also withdrawing frozen beef products sold under the Findus brand, and dealers from Holland and Cyprus being implicated, the idea of there being a vast criminal network is gaining ground. But, with the inadequacies in the food control system showing up, and now with a suggestion that drug residues could be harmful, this could be a scare ready to take off onto a higher plane. It is a while since we had a full-blow food scare, so the media might just be ready for one. And, with Labour politicians intent on making mischief, this could run for some time. It is worth remembering though, that such scares tend to be media events. In both the egg and BSE scares, consumer buying patterns were very quickly restored after the initial shocks. The scares then became closed loops between the media and the politicians, feeding off each other, while for the public they became a spectator sport. Much the same seems to be happening here, with processed food sales largely unaffected by the adverse publicity. As before, only the politicians and the media are getting worked up. But if the public start to see a real threat, this could be the turning point, where we see the scare escalate. The Irish Times puts it well. Any further breaches of confidence could be extremely costly, it says. The paper adds that, if a controversy lasts for more than two weekends, then the problem is really serious. At this stage, the horse meat issue has gone on for four weeks. We could be in for a torrid few weeks before things settle down. COMMENT: "HORSEMEAT" THREAD Richard North 11/02/2013 |
Media: the "incompetence" of the Times
Monday 11 February 2013
If ministers did their jobs as badly as the media seem to be doing on the horse meat "scandal", then we would be in real trouble. And, it seems, there is no end to the ability of the fourth estate to mess it up.
Thus, when Owen Paterson tells Andrew Neil that he can't ban imports because this is an "EU competence", the lowly Scottish Herald manages to get it right, but not the mighty Times. There, reporter Sadie Gray manages to translate Paterson's words into "European Union incompetence". Now, it is certainly true that the EU is incompetent, certainly in devising effective food law, but that is not what Paterson said. And while we would like to think that the error is a slip of the finger (it happens), we suspect it is not - especially when the same mistake is repeated in The Daily Telegraph (below), The Sun and the Daily Mail.  Rather, it points up the growing difficulties experienced in talking to the media. Their understanding of things EU is so basic, that it is almost impossible to find a low enough level at which facts can be communicated with any certainty that they will be understood and passed on correctly. And nor, it would appear, is this error without consequences. The Independent reports that French consumer minister, Benoît Hamon, "took a swipe at the British Government". He said that London "was complaining about weak European food inspection while cutting the budget for EU food-safety checks in Brussels". Yet, the only occasions where there have been apparent complaints by the British government about European inspection is where Mr Paterson is misquoted as complaining of "European Union incompetence". Wars have been started over less. Thus, while the EU has its competences, the media increasingly can only offer incompetences. No wonder it is a dying industry. COMMENT: "MEDIA" THREAD Richard North 11/02/2013 |
Horsemeat scandal: wanting it both ways
Sunday 10 February 2013
 We should focus, it pontificates, "on the mass retailers and the light-touch regulatory regime under which they operate", then turning on Owen Paterson's observation that those retailers had "ultimate responsibility" for what they sold. This, the newspaper concludes, "suggests that regime is unlikely to be beefed up in the near future". One staggers at the assertion that the "mass retailers" (aka supermarkets) are subject to a "light-touch regulatory regime". No one who had the slightest knowledge of food law in general and food safety law in particular could begin to make such a jaw-dropping assertion. But the demand for "more regulation" belies not only the current state, it also ignores the source of regulation in a field which is an exclusive EU competence. Calls for more regulation should be addressed to the European Commission, not Owen Paterson – who has been quite open in stating that food law is precisely that, an exclusive EU competence. But the ultimate irony, from a newspaper that is so enthusiastically pro-EU, is that, in stating that the "ultimate responsibility" rests with retailers, the eurosceptic Paterson is doing no more than re-stating EU law. This is set out in Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 "laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety", where Recital 30 declares: A food business operator is best placed to devise a safe system for supplying food and ensuring that the food it supplies is safe; thus, it should have primary legal responsibility for ensuring food safety. Although this principle exists in some Member States and areas of food law, in other areas this is either not explicit or else responsibility is assumed by the competent authorities of the Member State through the control activities they carry out. Such disparities are liable to create barriers to trade and distort competition between food business operators in different Member States.Presumably, The Observer would not want to see Mr Paterson breaching fundamental principles of EU law although, from the tone of its editorial, it clearly seeks that outcome. One can only conclude, therefore, that the newspaper's understanding of the law is slight, to non-existent. On this subject, we have so far written three pieces: Let them eat horse; criminal negligence; and a porous network - this is the fourth. A constant theme of these pieces is that this horse meat scandal represents an egregious failure of the EU system of regulation. It is to this that The Observer should be looking – not at the scale of regulation, but the type, which is designed to secure the free circulation of goods within the internal market. Separately, though, the newspaper reports on "international fraud by mafia gangs", but there is not the least recognition that this situation is the inevitable consequence of the EU regulatory regimes. When, on the one hand, the food industry is mandated, by way of regulation, to adopt a paper-based system of control (HACCP) and, on the other, to work within an international environment where border checks have been abolished, and when the national authorities are required to vest "ultimate responsibility" for food controls with the food businesses, the system is wide open for exploitation by criminals. All the traditional controls have been dismantled. The trouble is that this europhile newspaper seems to want it both ways. It is happy to see the European Union take over the power from member states to make food regulation, to to abolish border controls, but when the system goes "catastrophically wrong", as Labour's Mary Creagh put it today, it goes bleating to the national government demanding that things are put right. This hypocrisy, born of ignorance, blights the entire EU debate. With very few exceptions, even eurosceptics are failing to see the links between the EU and the horsemeat scandal. But, if national governments are blamed every time an EU system goes wrong, we will never get any further in beating the monster. COMMENT: "HORSEMEAT" THREAD Richard North 10/02/2013 |
Media: no wonder we have a problem
Sunday 10 February 2013
 We now have an explanation not only for the horsemeat crisis, but also the economic crisis. Europe is drowning in horsemeat.  But, if the Telegraph would thus have us drowning in horsemeat, the Independent on Sunday doesn't do so much better. It has Canada exporting 1.8 million tons of horsemeat to France in 2011, with Mexico sending another 1.2 million tons. The actual figures are, respectively, 1,800 and 1,200 tons. Newspapers these days are becoming a joke. Not only are their journalists profoundly ignorant, they are also inumerate. If these figures were taken at face value, they would represent something like 10 million horses – 50 times the entire number of horses (200,000) slaughtered in the EU annually. COMMENT: "MEDIA" THREAD Richard North 10/02/2013 |
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